In The Priestly Kingdom John H. Yoder defends a different way of doing Christian social ethics than what Constantinian models provide. The free-church tradition has a different history and different relationship to government. It is different than the Protestant and Catholic history of church and government. For when the Protestant reformers turned to the local governments to mediate their disputes with Catholic bishops, Protestantism became politicized, freezing their ecclesiology into patterns of administration which were no longer reformable (p. 24) leaving "the rebel" as the only option for social reform. Radical Protestantism offered another option: A voluntary commitment to community with freedom of confession. This method of ethical analysis must not be dismissed as "sectarian" or "contextual". For in truth, all theology is contextual, and comes from particular social locations. The voluntary, committed free-church community is a particular church tradition that provides a Christian model of ethical analysis that has existed in a manner more synonymous to pre-Constantinian Christianity: A minority, persecuted, disempowered community as opposed to the sort of Christianity of the dominant church/state power structures (p. 81). From this particular tradition, Yoder recommends that we dispense with universal claims to truth, and embrace what he calls a pluralist/relativist stance (p. 56) to the society and presentation of the gospel. By pluralist, I interpret him to mean contextual, or the voice of a social group not masquerading as the absolute (Yoder does not like the language of Lessing's "broad, ugly ditch", the other side of the ditch is another contextually derived perspective). By relativist, I interpret him to mean using a description that can relate to ones hearers. So, the language of the cosmos in both John chapter 1 and Colossians is pluralist -- recognizing its historical/social situatedness , but it is also relativist -- speaking a language its hearers recognize while turning those social norms on their heads. This is vital, for Yoder advocates that Christians usurp the language of someone else's ethics for his own system (p. 164) just he interprets the writers of the New Testament to have done. Thus, from within a community of committed followers -- "The Priestly Kingdom" -- Yoder advocates that we maintain a relationship with the rest of society and government that is capable of faithfully saying "thus saith the Lord" and can communicate Christ's Lordship in a manner that can be understood.
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As I've written before, Yoder's work has to be evaluated within the context of the sexual abuse he inflicted upon numbers of Mennonite women over the years. Some find his work so tainted that they dismiss him altogether. I am not one of those. But I believe this is an issue that has to be addressed when one attempts to engage Yoder faithfully.